


Names

by TheMuchTooMerryMaiden



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Season 7 non compliant, bad childhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-02
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-10 22:15:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1165183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMuchTooMerryMaiden/pseuds/TheMuchTooMerryMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like all of us he's been called different things at different times</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Jem

He never hears the name again after she leaves and he stores the memory away, hoarding it, only letting himself think it when he can’t stand not to, when the loneliness threatens to crush him to a thin film of nothing. It says warmth and love and all those things that went from his life when she went, when she left. It was the name only she called him; it was the name that was only between the two of them, just like he was the only one who would ever call her mum. 

There had been shouting and things broken and a feeling like all his insides were trying to get out and hide themselves better than he was hiding. Then the door had slammed and he’d run to the window to see what was happening, to see her going. She was getting into a stranger’s car and he wanted to call out, wanted her to look up and see him, wanted her to remember him and run back to get him. But she just got into the car and it drove away and just like that he wasn’t Jem any more. He didn’t know who he was now.


	2. James the Just

His lordship calls him James the Just. Lord Mortmaigne is very friendly with all the estate kids and he doesn’t make a fuss about James and the rest playing with Scarlet when she’s home from school, James knows that most people would have in that situation. He’s glad because even though sometimes Scarlet gets him into such a lot of trouble she is his best friend.

Most of the estate children get just a nod from his lordship, only a few of them get a nickname, James (the Just), Paul a couple of the others. It makes James feel special; it helps with the jealousy he feels towards Paul though he tries not to, when his lordship spends so much time with just Paul.

Paul seems quieter these days, less likely to want to play with the rest of them in the barn and the outbuildings, and much, much more ready to pick a fight if any of the others, the ones who’ve heard such things from their parents, say bad things about Lord Mortmaigne. When James asks Paul what he does with his lordship, Paul goes red and just says, 

“He teaches me things,” and James doesn’t ask again.


	3. Charity Case

“Charity Case,” it seems like the only thing he gets called at school, he gets called it so much that he has to remind himself to respond when someone, usually a teacher uses his real name. 

He doesn’t really fully understand how he ended up in this school being Charity Case. In some ways it’s great, he’s learning so much here, there’s so much to keep his mind occupied and some of the things he’s learning he knows he wouldn’t be learning back at the village school, the Latin and the Greek particularly where each sentence is its own little puzzle to solve.

It happened quickly, he remembers that. He’d told his dad that his lordship wanted him to learn to play the piano and his dad had gone up to the big house looking angry and almost the next thing he knew he was here, becoming Charity Case.

And it wasn’t that bad he told himself, it didn’t matter that he got called names because he had this brilliant chance, like his dad told him, like his lordship told him. Secretly he wondered whether if he worked hard he’d be good enough for them to call him something else.


	4. Lord Muck

The shouting had started so soon after he’d got home this time. He knew it was going to be bad when he’d been able to smell the beer as soon as he’d walked through the door.

“Oh, look,” his dad shouted, “it’s Lord Muck!”

He wasn’t sure why he hated being called that so much more than the name he got at school, but he did. It was the confirmation that he didn’t fit anywhere. 

It certainly didn’t matter what he tried at home. His first holiday back from school he’d got up dressed in work clothes, wanting to help his father. He was up first and he brewed coffee for his dad, passing him the cup when he came downstairs. His dad had looked him up and down before he spoke,

“What are you dressed like that for?”

The question was baked out, and he nearly flinched but he forced himself not to,

“I thought I could help you?” He hadn’t wanted it to come out a question but it did despite him,

“What help do you think you could be, Lord Muck?”

It was so shocking that he didn’t reply, just stood for a second before turning away.


	5. Hathaway

He decides two things on the eve of setting off for Cambridge. The first is that this will be his last night at ‘home’, it’s a battle he isn’t going to win whatever happens and it’s time to stop trying. The second is that he will be someone else when he gets there, he will not be the lad who gets pushed about, he will not be the person who gets called names.

And for once it turns out to be just that easy. He signs up for the rowing club as soon as possible and he sets about becoming Hathaway the sportsman, Hathaway the academic. And it’s just … easy.

But late at night he’s left feeling that no one here really knows him, that no one anywhere really knows him. There are lots of people who like Hathaway but he is sure that they wouldn’t like him, not if they knew him, they would be like his father, like the boys from school, like his mother.

He wonders what it would be like to be just him but right then he can’t quite make himself take the risk, not when things are so much better than they have been.


	6. James

It’s during his second year, when his place in the rowing team is secure, when he’s making a name for himself in the theology department that he meets Elizabeth. She’s like she stepped down from a renaissance tapestry and in his mind’s eye he always clothes her in cloth of gold. It takes him weeks to properly talk to her. When she asks him his name he stammers and blushes and gives her ‘James’.

He’s never pictured himself with a woman, or with anyone. Until it happens it’s never occurred to him that the sound of his name on the lips of a lover (his lover, how is that possible?) would sound so sweet.

Two months later the last word she says to him is his name. It hurts. It hurts and it feels bloody awful, but part of him thinks it doesn’t hurt as much as it should. The whole thing makes him turn back again to the idea of the priesthood. It’s not a new thought and he’s aware that it might just come from a desire to connect with his mother, but after Elizabeth he thinks about it more and more until he finally makes his decision.


	7. Brother James

There is such security in the seminary, he is called Brother James and when he is done he will be Father James and things will follow a predictable path and it won’t have the highs but it most likely won’t have the staggering lows.

Then one day, on The High, he walks into Will. Will who he hurt so badly, Will who is the only one who ever called him Jim, Will who was the reason he never thought he’d be with anyone. He hasn’t changed a bit. He’s still so lovely and even though he’s Brother James he still feels the same longing. He knows he shouldn’t, but he can’t seem to help himself and he agrees to meet up with Will for a drink in The Morsted. 

He tries desperately to keep the conversation light and mundane, to not allow the conversation to turn towards more personal things but Will isn’t having any of it and he asks the question. There is a roaring in his ears but he can still hear his reply. Even as he says them he knows that the words will echo in his brain forever and that he will never be ‘Father James’.


	8. Hathaway, Again

It’s not logical to anyone else, the progression from seminarian to policeman, but it is to him. The skills he would have used to help his parishioners, his understanding of people, hard won after a lifetime of being an outsider, still used to uncover hidden truths. 

The police force is surprisingly like life in college and here, again, he is Hathaway. 

One day he begins to count the number of ways in which his name can be said, he loses count at ten when a case comes up that needs his focus. The last one he counts is DI Knox who seems to use his name like it’s a complaint and in that respect it’s like being back at school, except that it’s not ‘Charity Case’, it’s ‘Graduate Entry’, but the meaning’s the same. He sticks with it though, not prepared to give up on a third profession before he’s thirty.

When he meets DI Lewis he thinks he can hear the same thing, (‘yer never letting a sergeant run a murder investigation’) but before he really quite knows it he realises that Lewis accepts him for what he is, he can’t really remember the last person that did that.


	9. James, Again

They’ve seen each other at their best and their worst; each has saved the other more than once, more often than not now he’s James, it feels right. Of course DI Lewis is only Robbie in the privacy of his own mind, the rest of the time he’s just sir, and James doesn’t think of the last person to call him James if he can help it.

One morning he’s called to a church, to a suicide that they’ll likely write off in a couple of hours, and finds Will. The enormity of what he did to Will hits him at once and then continues to hit him piece by piece. The worst of it is that step by step he’s forced into a further betrayal as evasion by evasion, omission by omission he lies to Lewis and compromises the case and yet Lewis gives him space and in the end saves him.

When he wakes in the hospital bed to see him, concern written clear, that is the point when James can no longer pretend at least to himself, that’s the point when he realises that here is the person whose happiness matters more to him than his own.


	10. Jim at Last

It doesn’t really matter how they got here. There were false starts and sometimes he still wonders what Robbie’s kids think about the whole thing, but he knows that the two of them are happy and that making sure that Robbie stays happy is his highest aim.

The first night they were together, when he almost couldn’t bear to blink in case in that instant it all turned out to be just his fantasy, when he wrapped his hand around Robbie and stroked him root to tip, Robbie had breathed his name,

“Oh, Jim!”

He’d always hated being called Jim, hated it until that moment, too close to being called Jem, both too personal and too casual. But the way Robbie said it with breathless desire, well, the two of them made the name something new, something that was just theirs.

And now with Robbie beneath him, saying his name over and over as he thrusts into him he realises that he never wants to be called anything else, that all the other names, all the other lives have been leading to this one place, leading him to the one place that he’s been supposed to be all this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It wasn't my intent to write this as non-season 7 compliant but I couldn't write Laura out and accomplish the last bit within 200 words so I took the coward's way out and mentally edited out Season 7. Sorry. I promise not to do it again :)


End file.
